Ring the Bells That Still Can Ring

by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Ring the Bells That Still Can Ring   by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer


Let this darkness be a bell tower / and you the bell. As you ring, / what batters you becomes your strength.
                  —Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Joanna Macy, from Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29
 
 
Batter me, love, like a bell. Till I ring
and ring and ring because everything
I am, my whole being, is vibrating
with the urgent, pressing call
for love—not the sweet love
of lullabies, but insistent love
that rings through walls,
love that drowns out any voice
not in service to the whole.
Batter me love, until there is no one,
including me, who cannot hear
the pounding imperative to be kind,
to find compassion,
until all beings feel real love pealing
through their bodies—
a resonant command
so true it cannot be unheard.
I have heard other love-battered
bells of humans, and the song of them
is charging me, changing me,
making me long to be rung only by love—
It is not easy to keep asking for the battering.
But worse to be silent.
Worse not to be bell.
Worse not to be an instrument of love.
Once I feared the battering.
Now, I fear it and thrill in the ringing—  
love, the only song I want to sing.
 
 
*title from “Anthem” by Leonard Cohen